Wilfdire Recovery and Planning

Robert Studville: So, welcome to "On the Park Bench Public Square Conversation," brought to you by the Congress for the New Urbanism. "On the Park Bench" presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied fields related to the built environment. And today, the subject is wildfire recovery and planning with Kate Blystone, Neil Payton, and Barry Long, moderated by myself, Robert Studville. So, share your thoughts on hashtag #ontheparkbench, and register for CNU 33. CNU 33 will be in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 11th through 14th. And this historic port city has stunning architecture and some of the best new urbanism in the US. There's going to be an awesome agenda and program; you don't want to miss it. Go to cnu.org/cnu33. And today, we're going to talk about wildfire recovery and planning, which is on the minds of many people across America, given what happened in Los Angeles in January. We have three planners who have proximity to the major fires that have destroyed in recent years, including Lahaina in Hawaii, Paradise in California, and the LA fires, of course. Kate Blystone is the Maui County Planning Director, appointed to the position after the August 8th, 2023 fires that destroyed Lahaina Town. She co-led development of the Lahaina Long-Term Recovery Plan, which will guide the rebuild process. In her more than 20-year career as a planner in Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, she has focused primarily on housing policy, long-range planning, and community engagement within the public, private, and nonprofit sectors of the profession. Barry Long is Principal and President of Urban Design Associates, an international planning, architecture, and urban design practice based in Pittsburgh. Barry is a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Pennsylvania Society of Architects, and the Congress for the New Urbanism. He worked with the City of Paradise to create a long-term recovery plan following the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed most of the city. He and UDA are now working with Paradise on a downtown plan. And Neil I. Payton, F.A.I.A., F.C.N.U., is an architect, urban designer, and Senior Principal at Torti Gallas Partners, also an international planning, urban design, and architecture firm, where he created and directs the firm's West Coast office in Los Angeles. As a resident of Santa Monica, he lives within two miles of the mandatory evacuation area of the recent Pacific Palisades fire. He is a contributor to Public Square, and he wrote a piece for Common Edge called "Reclaiming Urbanism After the LA Fires," in which he examines opportunities for mixed-use rebuilding in the town centers. His view is a practical one that acknowledges facts on the ground. I'm Rob Studerville, editor of CNU's Public Square, and I want to acknowledge the terrible tragedy that LA has gone through, and indeed Lahaina Town and Paradise before that. First, I'm going to let the panelists speak, and then I'm going to ask some questions. And then we're going to go to Q&A from the audience. So please use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you, and we'll more or less get to those in the order that they are asked. So welcome, Barry, Kate, and Neil, to "On the Park Bench." And I'm going to pass this along to Barry first to talk. So, you are muted, Barry. Barry Long: Sorry, Rob. I just asked, I assume this session is being recorded for the participants? Okay. Okay. Well, good afternoon. Robert Studville: Yes. It will be posted a day later. Barry Long: So, as Rob said, our firm UDA does all types of disaster recovery planning, from floods to hurricanes to wildfires. Given today's topic and our limited time, I'm going to discuss one recovery effort for Paradise, California, and I'll cover three things. First, I'm going to share a short story about Paradise just for orientation for those that may not know – a very short story. Then I'm going to go through five key takeaways. There are many more, but these are three that have stuck with us. And then finally, I'm going to finish with our wildfire adaptation principles that we've developed that we include in our long-term recovery planning, based on the efforts that we've been involved with. So first, just a short story about Paradise, and we've titled this simply "Resiliency and Adaptation." The town of Paradise was incorporated in 1979, evolving from nearly two centuries of informal development in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Its heritage is rooted in prospecting, logging, agriculture, and eventually the city of Chico's rising cost of living. As orchards transformed into neighborhoods, the wildland-urban interface enveloped the town. One resident said, "It was like camping every day." And then one day, the Camp Fire struck. Tragically, 85 residents lost their lives, and virtually the entire town was burned to the ground, making it the worst wildfire in California history in terms of loss of life. Mayor Jody Jones promised to rebuild, a commitment echoed by the residents. This led to the question, "How do we restore our town and make it more resistant to wildfires?" The answer lay in developing a tailored rebuilding strategy. The town board engaged UDA to listen to residents, identify priorities, recommend ideas for hardening, and create a long-term recovery plan. The plan provided the community with a blueprint for rebuilding. Today, Paradise is the fastest-growing community in California, boasting some of the country's strictest building codes. Although the last chapter is yet to be written, both former and new residents are returning to find the town of Paradise to be all its name implies. So, five key takeaways. And we tried to pull these based on the topic today, which is wildfire recovery and planning. So these are planning-oriented. But the first takeaway for us is that recovery planning is uneven between communities. So as planners, you think the first step after disaster is creating a recovery plan. The feds publish a guideline on how to do it; it should be straightforward. What's not well known, though, is that formal plans are generally privately funded. There's no reliable source of public funding to do the planning. There is for other things, but not planning. Paradise was fortunate that the local Butte Strong Fund stepped up immediately to fund their long-term recovery plan. But most communities don't have that luxury or choose to recover organically. So context really matters when it comes to planning. The second takeaway is community engagement also matters. In a town council meeting soon after the fire, Mayor Jody Jones asked me, "How do you rebuild the town?" And I answered honestly that I had no idea, but that we'd figure it out together. And listening to residents was the first step, and the town will tell you even today that it was the most crucial step. We had phenomenal resources at our disposal, and we led an exhaustive community engagement process. What we heard when we listened was, "We don't want you to redesign our town. We want a better version of what we had." And this is common throughout our disaster recovery work. The third takeaway is that economics play a big part in who gets to come back. So if your mortgage was paid off and you had a good insurance policy, your chances are good if you choose to come back. If you need to use your settlement to pay off your mortgage and you're starting over, your chances are less good, just because of the cost. If you're a senior, a renter, an affordable housing resident, your chances of returning are diminished even more. And this is what we know now, just looking back over the last six-plus years since the Camp Fire. And this is also true for commercial in a different way. Commercial typically lags residential, and we're seeing this today in Paradise, making it susceptible to residential redevelopment if local zoning permits. This was the case in Paradise. We've been working with the town to change the zoning in the downtown to make sure that we preserve the opportunity as housing comes back. And just to give you an idea and benchmarking progress: approximately 13,500 homes burned on the day of the Camp Fire. We're six years out from the initial building permits. Permit one was issued. 25% of the housing stock has been rebuilt, and another 5% on top of that has building permits. So by the end of this year, we hope to be back at 30% approximately, or just over. The fourth takeaway is that insurance availability and premiums are slowing recovery. This was the number one issue when we updated Paradise's recovery plan three years into rebuilding. The town has adopted, obviously, the Wildland Urban Interface Code, the WUI code, but they've also adopted numerous ordinances on top of that, which make it even more difficult to build, but important in their context. And they require the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety Prepared Home Standards on top of everything else, and insurance is still an issue, a significant issue. And then the fifth takeaway is that property consolidation is very difficult. Folks oftentimes have an incentive not to sell their property. They could be waiting for a settlement. In Paradise, folks have been waiting for PG&E's settlements for up to six years after the disaster in some cases. Owning a vacant lot can be an investment, so sometimes folks just hang on to it hoping to rebuild, or the nostalgia of their home site is another reason not to sell. What we find, especially in wildfires, is building back in the same pattern is common, and it's difficult to make large-scale planning changes after a disaster. And then I'll just finish up with our wildfire adaptation principles, which we've developed. And our experience in doing wildfire recovery is that you really need to work at the regional scale, the community scale, and the home scale. There's no one thing you can do that solves all. And what makes this difficult is that it means everybody has to work together, which can be challenging. So at the regional scale, actively managing the forest or the grasslands is the first step. And then creating fire breaks between, we'll call them, the wildlands and the urbanized areas is important. Hardening infrastructure – electrical, water, sewer, storm – is critical because it expedites building back. It can also help prevent a disaster. Creating redundant emergency notification systems is very important. And providing multiple ingress and egress routes in a regional emergency evacuation system, assuming that it could happen again and being prepared. At the community scale, prohibiting dead-end streets and fostering neighborhood fuel reduction in places of refuge are critical. And then at the home scale, codifying defensible space, requiring fire-resistant building shells, and encouraging aggressive code enforcement are important. And I will say that affordability and the speed of building back in our experience is generally a higher priority for survivors than fire-resistant construction. So I'll just finish by saying that the community spirit in Paradise has strong staff, town council, and the residents are amazing, really. And it was a privilege to work with them and continue to work with them. And a new Paradise is rising like a phoenix despite its challenges. And I'll pass it to Kate. Kate Blystone: Well, aloha kakahiaka, or aloha to those of you that are eating lunch right now or getting close to lunch from Maui here. I want to just thank Congress for New Urbanism for inviting me to come speak with you today. I had a great time at the last conference doing a presentation similar to this, and I'm happy to be a little bit further distant from where I was when I spoke to you last. I'll talk a little bit about where we are in the process. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about where we were prior to the fire. So I was working for Hawaii Community Foundation, and my job was to solve our housing crisis. And I know that's super easy to do that in an afternoon, but I was taking my time with it because we were about 10,000 units short of where we needed to be prior to the fire. And then we lost around 2,000 units during the fire, displacing 12,000 people. And so when I say those numbers, if you're doing math in your head – and I know we're all planners, so we don't do math anyway – but in your head, like you recognize that we were overcrowding a lot of these units. That there were these, I know of one unit that was housing three generations of families, a two-bedroom apartment that was housing three generations of families that we lost in the fire. So we displaced a lot of people. And so, of course, what Barry was talking about, this desire to move quickly, is certainly something we felt. But our systems were designed to go slow and be deliberative. They're not built for this moment. So if everyone wants to rebuild as soon as possible, we have to figure out how to adjust our system. So that's a lot of what we've been doing. And it doesn't help when we say, "Hey, we issued permits three months faster than any other consultant that we've hired to issue that has been hired." So this consultant that we're working with has worked with a lot of communities post-disaster, and we issued permits three months faster. But if you're a community member who lost their home and still doesn't have their permit, that is not helpful information for you. Many of the folks that lost their home had never built one before, right? We have a lot of generational families in Lahaina. And so they inherited their home. There are folks who just have only bought homes. And so they're navigating a brand new process with our systems that are a little old and a little outdated. And so that was tricky. The other piece is that we had 87% of those that were displaced by fire were renters. 87%. So that means that those folks aren't going to be able to rebuild their homes. They're waiting on someone to rebuild those homes for them. And in a lot of cases, we lost people. They moved back to the continent, or to the continent for the first time, because cost of living is significantly lower and they could find a place to live. Right now, a lot of our housing stock – and we're trying to solve this through the process – a lot of our housing is tied up in transient vacation rentals or short-term rentals. We allow that use in our apartment district, and as a result of it, it's proliferated because, of course, if you're going to make thousands of dollars by renting your room nightly, you're going to go for that over renting it to a local family for a couple thousand dollars a month. And so that has been another part of this challenge. So the thing that I think that we've learned is our systems need refinement, and we have to go incredibly quickly to make those things happen. Otherwise, things are getting built in this kind of imperfect system. So that's kind of the lay of the land and some of the daily chaos that I'm dealing with here in this job as the planning director. But one of the things that I'm really proud of that we've done is the long-term recovery plan. And from day one, this was a community-led and government-supported process. So I have a ton of gratitude, and I take every opportunity I can, to the community for coming out and sharing their thoughts and feelings. So while they're going through this tragedy, they've lost everything, and they're living in a hotel, they're showing up at our workshops, hundreds of them, to tell us what they wanted to stay the same when Lahaina was rebuilt and what they wanted to change. And those two questions brought out all kinds of information to us. And it resulted in this long-term recovery plan that we published in December. And that long-term recovery plan is just projects and programs that lead to the rebuild of Lahaina. So by putting them in the community, or in the long-term recovery plan, we're able to seek out funding for those projects. And it forms kind of the foundation for – I'm going to give you a really great acronym – CDBG-DR. So Community Development Block Grant, Disaster Recovery Funding. And so we were allocated $1.6 billion with a B for our recovery effort from Congress right before the administration changed, and we're working on the action plan right now, working with the community on that. So that will help that process. A couple takeaways that I want to mention from that process that are really important: if this happens to you – and I'm sorry, but many of you on the call will have this experience – if this happens to you, lean into your federal support. We were very lucky. I won't name specific names because it would shame them to know that I was like saying their names out loud. They're behind the scenes most of the time. But a huge mahalos and gratitude to the FEMA Community Assistance Team. Those guys, we had never done anything like this before, but when we're struggling through what we're trying to do here and trying to build a long-term recovery plan that met the needs of our community, we had these angels that came and helped us and said, "Well, this is the way that we did it in other communities." And we're like, "Well, that doesn't work for us because this is Maui, and we're different," because of course we're different. We're in the middle of the ocean. We're really far from stuff. So how do we meet the community where they are? And they helped us with that process. I think the other thing, and before I shift into the last part of what I want to say, is I have a huge gratitude for the debris removal team with Army Corps of Engineers. There is nothing sadder than looking at the ruins of your town. And it makes it really hard to see what the future could look like when all you've got is all of these memories and the crumbling remains in the form of ash and debris of your life. And Army Corps of Engineers is working in LA now to do this debris removal process. They finished our debris removal process last week. And what that did is it gave us a blank slate. It gave us a place to go, "Okay, let's go forward together. Now we can see, now we can dream about the future." So going forward with this blank slate, we are trying to rebuild with resiliency and address some of the things that weren't working about Lahaina. So when we asked what you want to come back the same and what you want to change, we heard plenty about what needed to change. And so we're trying to address that. A lot of those things were related to resiliency. But a lot of those things were also related to just how the community was functioning, that it was built more, it had shifted away from being for the local families that live there and much more focused on the folks who visit there. And so we are trying through this recovery process to address that concern, to address those needs. So we're building a community that we're hoping will last for generations, and trying to balance going fast and doing well. But specifically in our department, we're trying to focus on what matters. And with us, what matters right now is getting our people home, housing those people. So we're trying to move as quickly as we can, rebuilding some of those affordable and workforce housing structures that we had in the core of Lahaina Town, giving them a clearer path to that. And then we're also centering the voice of the people. And one of my colleagues that I work on recovery stuff with says, "You move at the speed of trust." And building trust – and Barry was mentioning this, the community engagement piece – building trust with the community is vital. You can't get them to tell you what they want, what their dreams are, if they don't trust you to effectuate those dreams. And so what we've been doing over the last year through the long-term recovery plan is making promises and working with the community and then keeping those promises to the extent that we can. So that's a big piece of this. And the last two things I'll say is that we're right now, one of the two of the things that I say the most are, "We are living in unprecedented times," and "traveling in uncharted waters." And I would give anything to live in precedented times and charted waters. But we're not quite there yet. And my thing that I want you all to know for sure is that this is going to keep happening. Like I said earlier, there's many of you on this call that are going to experience whether it's a fire, flood, a hurricane. Climate change is real, and it's happening, and the effects of it are going to be the focus of planners, urbanists of all kinds for generations, while we ride this out. And so I think I'm going to leave you with a Hawaiian proverb, or as we call them, "ʻŌlelo Noʻeau": "ʻAʻohe hana nui ke alu ʻia," that means "No task is too big when done together by all." And so just keep that in mind if this happens to you, that you have the support of your community around you to get this done, and everyone brings something to this process. And you can do this together. So you got this. That's all I want to say. Neil? Neil Payton: Yeah, hi. Thank you, Barry and Kate. It's difficult to follow you both. I'm going to talk a little bit about the basically the neighborhood centers of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, which are the epicenters of the two major fires that occurred recently. This is not to discount the importance of looking at all of the single-family houses that burned down, which was the majority of the destruction. It's just not what I'm focused on. And the reason is because there's a whole lot of other stuff besides single-family houses that burned. In fact, the latest stats are that 374 commercial properties burned in the two areas, about $2 billion in value there. This included 143 retail properties, 135 multifamily properties, 49 office buildings, and 45 other things. Now, 75% of the multifamily buildings contained 20 units or less, and the general age of these buildings was 70 years old on average. Most of them were owned by individuals, some out-of-towners, and a few by local investors. You might call a lot of this housing naturally occurring attainable or affordable housing, or even missing middle or workforce housing. That's a huge loss. Thousands of people who did not live in single-family homes lost their home. Now, this represents also a very dispersed and finely grained ownership pattern, which is both a challenge and an opportunity in redevelopment. Now, the challenge, of course, is in any sort of replanning, it is difficult when there are so many landowners. If any of you have worked in sort of suburban retrofit, you know how difficult it is in part because a typical suburban shopping center is usually five, six, seven owners. You can't see those lines, but they're there. You know, recognizing that you have all of that different dispersed land ownership is an important part of this. I call this "facts on the ground." You can't see these parcels, but they're very, very powerful. And I'll tell you, give you an example misreading that. So the famous Daniel Burnham, who people know from the Chicago Plan, actually did a plan for San Francisco in 1904, before the Chicago Plan. And it was a very ambitious plan, full of diagonals that connected parks to parks and civic buildings. And it looked like Haussmann from the 19th century Paris had done it, but he was backed by an emperor. Or L'Enfant had done it, but he was operating on raw land. But in this case, Burnham was operating in an existing gridded town. And he did this plan, and absolutely nothing got done. But two years later, an earthquake happened and leveled three quarters of the city, leveled three, either leveled it or it burned down after the earthquake. And Burnham came back to San Francisco and basically said, "Hey, I got the plan! I got the plan!" And still nothing happened. Because despite the fact that the buildings weren't there, the property lines were still there. So misreading that is done at your own risk. At the same time, you can't deny that this is a momentous occurrence. It's been compared – the former head of FEMA compared this to LA's Katrina moment. And so, and so, you know, with that in mind, one wonders, well, what is the alternative to that? And I'm taking again, I go again and look at San Francisco, but this time, 1989, and the Loma Prieta earthquake that occurred. In this case, things didn't burn down, but a lot of the city, or some of the city, fell down. And most importantly, something called the Central Freeway fell down. The Central Freeway went through a neighborhood that had been torn asunder when it was built back in the early '60s, an area called Hayes Valley. And this freeway wrecked the neighborhood. When it was torn down, they debated whether to rebuild it for, I don't know, 10 years or so. It was a long time. And ultimately decided not to rebuild it and to replace it with what is now known as Octavia Boulevard. And the CNU has documented this freeway, not teardown, but fall down, in its literature. But I was interested not just in the freeway and the rebuilding of a boulevard, but in what occurred around that. And what occurred was a plan to rebuild Hayes Valley, but not by changing the street network, not by changing the parcel lines, but by changing the zoning. And by allowing for a much more robust and diverse mix of uses, which also required, which gave bonuses for building affordable housing, a mix of uses, et cetera, et cetera, including public open space. And the result of that is a neighborhood now, if you know Hayes Valley, you know it's one of the most exciting and dynamic neighborhoods in San Francisco. And that was all done by looking at the zoning and by looking at entitlement strategies that would bonus affordable housing. And so I began to think that that might be a model for LA. Now, what are the opportunities in LA? In the case of the Palisades, you have an area that the neighborhood center is actually quite suburban, although the street network of the houses is actually a pretty traditional grid and would feel at home in any new urbanist community. The neighborhood center is actually quite an auto-centric place. And one imagines that you could begin to create a much more diverse, walkable community by putting the parking behind, by bringing buildings closer to the street, by creating a public realm along the sidewalk with landscape, by creating more than two stories of buildings. And the opportunity here is the following: the retail and commercial areas are not going to be in a hurry to rebuild because there are no customers at the moment. Not only that, but some of these areas will be staging grounds for other activities, such as concrete batch plants, lumber yards, and the like, because the traffic, the construction traffic alone to rebuild some of the housing will be intense. Recognizing that much of this won't be rebuilt right away, there might be an opportunity for considering a rezoning in California, what's called a specific plan process, which allows for a more dynamic, diverse mix of uses, which is designed to support pedestrian life as well as the existing auto life that's there. And I guess I'll leave it at that. Robert Studville: Well, thank you very much, Neil, and Kate, and Barry. Very interesting perspectives on what's happening in these three very different areas. I want to remind everybody that you can ask questions by using the Q&A function of Zoom. And we're going to get to these fairly shortly, but I'm going to ask a few questions to begin with. One is kind of a question that zooms out. It's a big question, but I think it's a vital one, given that we're talking to a CNU audience, basically, and your CNU planners. I was just at, I sat in on the Charter Awards jury this weekend. It's a wonderful privilege. But what sets apart new urbanists, or people who believe in these types of concepts, walkable neighborhoods, is that we have a Charter of the New Urbanism, or if you're not familiar in detail with that, like at least principles of the New Urbanism. How can the Charter or the principles of the New Urbanism guide change in a place that's trying to recover something, a disaster like this? I don't know if any of you have thoughts on this. Kate? Kate Blystone: Yeah, so if I can, there's a couple of things that I think are relevant that I didn't get a chance to say in my first part. Most of Lahaina was built prior to zoning, right? So one of the things that we joke about in New Urbanism is it's actually kind of old urbanism. So that's kind of what we're trying to do with Lahaina. So there are aspects of the work that we're doing that fit in very nicely with New Urbanism. And the next phase of the work that we're doing is what we're calling the Rebuild Lahaina Plan. And that is bringing in some of the luminaries that you guys interact with all the time in Congress for New Urbanism to help us talk with the community, do design charrettes, and build a community that embodies those principles very, very closely. Some of the things that we're talking about are the future of Front Street. This is a street that until the fire had cars on it. I was talking with one property owner who brought in his plans to see if they fit within the emergency proclamation and said, "Hey, you know," I said, "Tell me about your sidewalks." And he said, "Well, we have a great sidewalk in front of our building for a little bit. And then there's this cutout where there's a loading zone. And so people would, I have kept Band-Aids. I kept Band-Aids by the front door of my business because people would be walking along this nice, beautiful, wide sidewalk and then fall off where the loading zone is because the sidewalk disappeared." So correcting some of that stuff where we've inserted car culture into a place that was historically designed for walking and for just that slower pace of life is going to be a really huge, huge thing for that community. It's going to change the nature of that community. I'm excited to be working with a lot of the new urbanists that we interact with all the time. CNU, Congress, you know, it's so fun to be able to look across that group, and I won't say any of their names here, but I look across that group and I go, "Ooh, this is a dream team." I'm looking forward to working with them on this rebuild plan. So that's some of where I'm thinking. Neil? Barry? Barry Long: Use of the Charter in rebuilding? Well, I would say, in Paradise, some of the things that have been implemented: the walkable downtown, which they didn't have before the fire. The infrastructure is in. We don't have the commercial market to rebuild the entire downtown area yet, but a walkable downtown, sidewalks, and bike lanes has been implemented. We also added a multi-purpose path system through the town. One of the arguments was that it can be used for emergency vehicles in case of another disaster as a parallel network, which was an issue the day of the fire. Another thing that has been codified is a connected street network because most fatalities happen on long dead-end streets. And I'm talking about very long dead-end streets. That's not permitted anymore. The network is being woven together. And this was unincorporated county when it was developed originally. It was developed in the 1950s, that was its peak period of development, and then it was incorporated and became the town of Paradise. So they've been stitching together a town from what was informal development, very dense informal development. But I think what Neil said was right about, I mean, Paradise is a town of 26,000 residents, or was before the fire. It's a platted town. It was fully built out with its infrastructure, its home sites, its commercial districts. And after the fire, it still had all those lines and ownership. It just didn't have the ownership buildings, or a very small percentage of what was there before the fire. Neil Payton: Yeah, I actually, Rob, because I'm going last here, an opportunity to Google because I don't remember the points off the top of my head, though I live them in my head. But I think it comes down to the neighborhood, the district, and the corridor section. The neighborhood, the district, and the corridor are essential elements of development. And what I'm talking about is reinforcing the neighborhood. Neighborhoods should be compact, pedestrian-friendly, and mixed-use, which is exactly what I just talked about. Many activities of daily living should occur within walking distance, allowing independence to those who are not, who do not drive, and especially the elderly and the young, exactly. And within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction. And then you go down to the block, the street, and the building, and you see that the primary task of all urban architecture and landscape is the physical definition of streets and public places. So, and, you know, that's what I'm just, everything that I've just spoken about is that. And they should be guiding principles for whatever happens in, I hope, in Altadena and in the Palisades. But Altadena actually has more of the, more spatial definition issue intact. They don't necessarily have the diversity of uses in the town center, in the neighborhood center, but they definitely have the kind of a main street, whereas the Palisades really doesn't. So that's a key. Robert Studville: Okay. The other thing that comes to mind, another thing is that, and Kate mentioned this, maybe you all did, but there's a lot of pressure to rebuild quickly. And people want to get back in their houses. And that often means a default: rebuild the way it is. I mean, they may not want to hear about, to hear about, to hear about major changes because that could slow down the process. So how do you balance a need to rebuild quickly with a need to rebuild better and solve some of the problems the community had before the fire occurred? Anybody with thoughts on that? Barry Long: Well, you're inviting it to happen again if you don't rebuild in a way that is consistent with the current context. And many, many communities, or let's just say our communities, are not built for their existing context. So you have to build in, and a lot of it ends up being codified if you want to rebuild adaptation and resiliency. And if you don't, the insurance company is likely to make you do it. But on the other side, I will say there's a falloff from the date of the fire to the fire when you see the residents who were there before the fire coming back to when the market normalizes and its new residents. And that's really happened in Paradise. So as we said, we've rebuilt 25% of the housing stock. So probably, I would estimate right now, we're going to actually have real numbers on who came back, hopefully in the near future. Probably less than 20% of the residents that were there on the day of the fire made it back. The rest are new residents. And as the market normalizes, Paradise has a competitive advantage because of its affordability and available building sites, which the valley below it doesn't. But time is critical if you really want to have folks come back. It's like replanting a tree. There's only so long before it's not going to get replanted again. And that's what happens with families. Kate Blystone: I'd like to jump in. I think there's a couple, a couple of things that we learned through the process. And I think we had a lot of development, for those of you who've been to Lahaina, there was a lot of development makai or waterward of Front Street. And that is where we have been focusing our energy for buying up properties. So those properties, everyone has a path to rebuilding. For some people, that path is incredibly difficult, including involving the state legislature in some of their processes. So we wanted to give people another option, and buying out those properties is one of them. We could do that through hazard mitigation funds, although it doesn't seem like that's going to be as likely as using some of our Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds to do that. In fact, our neighbors on Hawaii Island use CDBG-DR funding for buyouts or everything after the last lava. So that's one piece of it too. The other thing is in our emergency proclamations where we're waiving some of the rules for certain circumstances. One of the things we said is, if you're building the same thing again, you can go faster, right? I'm abbreviating it, "with modification as approved by the director." So, for example, one of these affordable housing projects came in to me and said, "Kate, we want to do a couple different things. We want to move this particular building outside of the erosion hazard line so it's safer, so it's not going to be subject to the ravages of climate change." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly what that little phrase is for," is to give me a little flexibility to ensure that there's not increased impact on the special management area that I work in, but also gets us to a more resilient product in the end. So having some flexibility is really, really, really helpful. But we're very early in our process. Paradise certainly has been down this road a lot longer. So those are the two things that we're looking at right now. I'm sure as we move through this process, we're going to find more and more ways to... Neil Payton: I'll just add that, again, I want to emphasize that I'm focused on the neighborhood centers, and I don't think it's going to happen. I think there's a natural slowness to this. A, as I mentioned, there isn't any market at the moment for retail. B, it's going to take, I mean, the entire cleanup is estimated to take a year, right? So, okay. Third, some of, because the zoning in place will not support the redevelopment of what was there. It doesn't make sense from a retail perspective. It's just not going to happen. So there will be a pressure to change things anyway. And so I actually think there is a built-in slowness that we should take advantage of. Not do anything to slow anything down, but it will be slow on its own. And we would be crazy not to be crazy, fill in that gap. Robert Studville: So I'm going to get to questions from the audience because we're starting to build up, and the first one is for Kate, although it may relate to Paradise in LA as well. "I understand one of the challenges of rebuilding in Lahaina is that Maui zoning code forbids the reconstruction of historic Front Street the way it is. Can you talk about the ways you and the county are overcoming those challenges?" Kate Blystone: Yeah, I think that's a great question. So there was a couple of things. Front Street has what we call historic district zoning. So we've had the ability, so a lot of the things in our zoning were captured. And when we did the long-range plan for this area, literally passed it in 2022, so right before the fire, not long before the fire, it kind of married those two things together between the zoning and the community plan. And it said, "This is how when you, when you build in this area, this is what you get." We just never expected to have to build everything all at once. So a lot of the character that people understand Front Street having actually is fine. The biggest thing, and the one that we're grappling with right now, is parking. And I have a colleague on another island who said, "Oh, well, our parking code doesn't say motorized parking." So I'm taking that to mean like bike parking as well. But for us, it does say motorized parking. And so we just refer in the historic district back to the parking code. So we need to look at our parking code because I think one of the things that we're very, very clear on is we want a pedestrian-oriented community when we're done. And so that includes likely a pedestrian-only Front Street, which I think is good. It's good because that Front Street is built on a seawall. And as a result of that, it's constantly being bashed by waves, and we're getting higher tides and bigger storms. And so it's good to have maybe not so much weight on that infrastructure. And a lot of our infrastructure is running in Front Street as far as water, wastewater, electrical, and all of that. So we need to move some of that out slowly over time because it's a big process. So, I mean, I think getting to the question that parking is our biggest barrier to rebuilding Front Street. So we're looking at ways to consolidate that parking. I can do parking reduction waivers up to 50%. So if you're required to have 10 parking stalls, I can give you five. But we have to put those five somewhere for the moment. And so the county is looking at ways to consolidate that parking into a parking structure, running shuttles, or figuring out other ways to move people through the community so they don't have to have a car for everything. We have a very, very car-dependent community here in Maui. And that's for a number of reasons. Part of it is pride, and this is your space, and you've got your car, and you can cruise around the world. Part of it is just because we don't have the infrastructure for people to do anything else, but we forget that there are people on both ends of the age spectrum who cannot drive, right? And they are marginalized in communities like this. So we're working on some of those issues, and parking is the biggest one when it comes to our rebuild. Robert Studville: Barry, did you do a form-based code there in Paradise, or was it like surgical zoning changes or anything? Barry Long: Well, originally, the long-term recovery plan, and I think what Kate discussed is similar, is more policy-focused because it's a way to ask for the money. And you're not talking about small sums of money. We're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars in asks. Subsequent to that, they were working on right now is that plan for downtown to get the walkable downtown that the town desires. And this is probably, they've said, the one area of town where, as Neil pointed out, they really can have change of different form than they had pre-fire because it's not going to come back quickly. They don't have the market yet, even though Paradise is a center for communities around it too, which didn't burn. More commercial than residential survives. So it's going to take to about 2055 to rebuild the core of town and actually to have the town rebuilt completely. So we are working on updating the zoning right in the middle of the process for the downtown area, the core of the community. And it will be mixed-use. It already has been rebuilt as walkable. And it'll have different zoning. Robert Studville: There's a question: "Given the political situation in Los Angeles, how likely is it that any recovery planning will be achievable?" I suppose that could be taken in a number of ways. Could the recovery planning be done, or is it achievable? Do you have thoughts on that, Neil? Neil Payton: Well, I'm a, I mean, I live here, and if it wasn't, I would be very depressed. So, I mean, I'm an actual optimist. But a couple of things need to be said. The fire hit many different jurisdictions. It's not just Los Angeles that's involved here. It's Los Angeles County in Altadena with its own set of codes. It hit Pasadena a little bit. It also hit Malibu, which is its own city. So each of those is their own sort of issue. But since the question literally said Los Angeles, look, there are a lot of groups out there right now thinking about this question and meeting about it. I was at three meetings this past week with different groups. They're all talking to each other, but I mean, I'm sorry, within the group, but do the groups talk to each other? Do they talk to the political folks, to the deciders? Not yet. And that's a process. But I do think that LA has in the past managed to do amazing things. So I'm actually somewhat optimistic that some of this can be done. It will not happen the, I'm suggesting this will not become an idyllic little place, but it will be better than it was. Barry Long: One thing that might be a compass or similar: 2020 Memorial Day fires, right at the beginning of the, early on in the pandemic in Oregon. Affected a number of different cities, and we did one recovery plan there, but the CDBG-DR allocation was for the state, and they broke it up between many jurisdictions. It's very hard to do. Having done it, I will say, it's very hard to try to do a recovery plan for multiple jurisdictions. It's much easier when you're dealing with one town and one governmental entity. But in Oregon, it was beyond that. We were working with four jurisdictions that were connected, but there were probably another eight fires in the state at the same time. So what Oregon did with their CDBG-DR money is actually really interesting. They're using it for housing recovery now, which has not been our experience in the state of California. They did not use it to subsidize housing in Paradise. All the recovery money went to infrastructure because the infrastructure was destroyed. And the way Oregon, because the state has discretion over how they use their CDBG-DR, is using it is fascinating. But these multi-jurisdictional fires are exponentially more complicated, is our experience. Robert Studville: We have a question: "What are the plans for the urban landscape interface? Does replanting with fire-resistant species or creating new recreational areas such as natural reserves apply?" Barry Long: We are doing that at the perimeter of Paradise, acquiring land and building a fire break. But the reality is the fire started on the outside of town eight miles away, and embers were being blown into town, over into town. It wouldn't be possible to create a big enough fire break. So back to the regional scale, the community scale, and the scale of your home. You really need to deal with it at all levels. But you can't discount the value of a fire break. Kate Blystone: Sorry about that. I didn't mean to interrupt you, Barry. I think the other thing, I'm excited about this topic right now because we're in the phase of rebuilding, and a lot of the folks that are rebuilding fastest are rebuilding with wood, right? And what we've learned is that it's not really about the wildland-urban interface as much as it is about the urban conflagration that happens with those embers that are carried. And if you have a bunch of homes that were built the same way, not with fire-resistant materials, you just create basically this chaos of this major fire that like you're surrounded by trees that didn't burn at all, but the houses burned because of the materials. And I'm, we're figuring out how to figure out how we're going to be working with our community, with our other departments – so we don't handle the building code in the planning department – but to get more the baseline fire-resistant materials. The problem being out here in the middle of the ocean is that it's hard to get those fire-resistant materials here. It's much easier to get the cheaper, I think it was Barry who was saying that cheaper wins the day. These cheaper materials are going to be used, but what that creates is just a situation where we're going to have similar situations, similar fires in the future. The name of the wind that caused our fire is the Kauaʻula winds. They have been there for generations. That's the reason they're named that. So they move at 100 miles an hour, and you can't, unless you have a community built with fire-resistant materials, things like this will keep happening. And you don't even need every house to be built with fire-resistant material. You need enough. It's like vaccinations and herd immunity. Like if you have enough, then you get to keep that community even in the face of a significant catastrophic wildfire like what we experienced. Barry Long: And surrounding structures with defensible space, Cal Fire anyway will tell you, is maybe even more important. Hmm. Yeah, it's not the trees are not the problem. It's the ladder fuels underneath, and most of the older structures just act as ladder fuels, just to be honest about it. Probably most of what has burned in a lot of these fires is what we've built. Is man-made. Robert Studville: The question: "Was it possible to integrate any of the newer flood elevation realities in your work in Lahaina?" In the rebuilding? Kate Blystone: Yeah, absolutely. Anything rebuilt will have to be built to those flood standards. But a lot of the stuff that you'd expect on Front Street, it doesn't have to elevate too much. Pretty common. So we're, yeah, they'll have to incorporate that as part of their rebuild. Robert Studville: There's a question: "I've attended various webinars about designing to prevent forest fires. Most of the recommendations are completely contrary to what I would consider good urban design, certainly New Urbanist concepts. Am I alone in this? How do you reconcile good urban design with what these fire specialists are recommending?" Kate Blystone: This is my every day. Go ahead, Neil. Neil Payton: I mean, I just was, I'm sorry, I was just at an event on, I don't know, Friday, and we talked about this. And folks were saying how, you know, we need to widen streets and cut down a layer of the trees that are along the edge because the fire trucks need more room, and anyway, cars are, they were narrow anyway, and cars were knocking off the rearview mirrors of other cars. And I had to restrain myself from going nuts, but I pointed out that, I pointed out a couple of things. One, that was crazy because, A, the trees themselves add value to the neighborhood, and also if they're the right trees, help with a number of other things, including latent temperature of the streets. B, that the fire trucks come in many sizes. And the reason why LA's are so big is because their unions require a certain number of firefighters on each truck. But in Boston, they use a lot of smaller trucks in downtown. And C, that you have to balance the ability of a fire truck to get through a street quickly with the number of children that would be killed or injured by cars going exceedingly fast on streets that were way too wide. And that this was really a conversation that had to be had, but you couldn't just put one thing at the top because that was the thing that happened last week. And I'm going to tell you that is not an easy conversation, but you have to have it. Kate Blystone: Yeah, this is my every day right now because we're taking some density regulations through our county council, and people are showing up and saying, "Density equals danger," and it's not. It's not that. There are places that build six inches apart from each other, houses six inches apart from each other. And it's all about what we were just talking about. It's the materials that you build with. And so if we can get those materials, then we can build as dense as we want to. And I'm with Neil, right after the fire here, we had a lot of discussions about widening streets because, and one of the places with the most narrow streets, we lost a lot of people. The majority of the people died in that space. Part of it was because of the blockage, but most of it was because people, there weren't more ingress/egresses. And so I wrote a manifesto afterwards, when people started talking about we needed to widen the streets. I was like, "There's a million ways to do this that aren't widening streets." And we have to focus on those ways. And one of the things I want to just give to people is you can't have a secondary ingress/egress out of your community that is blocked. Because when it comes to a fire, people are in panic mode. They go out their street, they turn left. They go out their street, they turn left. They go out their street, they turn left. If you're telling them to turn right in an emergency, their brain is not wired that way. So this is a call for those connected communities instead of separating these communities from each other. We have to start building these connections so that they're automatic, so we can evacuate these places much more quickly. Robert Studville: We are at the hour, and we're at, you know, we are going to post this video tomorrow at CNU, so anybody can watch, watch it again, or if they have to leave, they can watch it more. But I don't know. Do you guys have a few more minutes to answer questions? They're still coming. Barry Long: Rob, on that one, I was just going to say, we are doing large-scale new community design in California still, and the discussion has changed, or at least insurability and looking at wildfire risk is a day one discussion, and I would say it didn't used to be. In California, it's always been a wrestling match on the streets, if we're just honest about it. We've won some battles and we've lost some, but it doesn't, I don't think personally that it precludes embedding the principles of the Charter at all. It just, it's just another, and critically important, planning piece that you have to consider because if it's not insurable, whether you're rebuilding a home or building a new community or hardening an existing community, if it's not insurable, and this is probably the primary issue for the future, it's a short discussion. Robert Studville: Question for Neil: "What are the political prospects for rezoning to accomplish what you envision? Can you leverage experiences in Paradise and Lahaina to make it happen? Do residents and property owners trust the powers that be to do the right thing? More thoughtful zoning." Neil Payton: There's a lot of distrust, to be sure. There was a hard-fought mayoral election two years ago. There'll be another one in two years, probably among the same two candidates, I'm guessing. And one of the losing candidates in the last election actually is a developer who has a project in the Palisades that survived. And so he has a lot of clout. I say that because I think that that's part of the, part of it's layered into the whole thing, you know, those dynamics. I think there are folks who do want to see change. I've spoken to many of them. And there are many others who don't. And it's like any project you do anywhere, there are going to be different sides of that coin. And I, New Urbanist role here is conversation with folks, pointing out the benefits of doing some of the things that we just talked about from the benefits that will make their lives better. And it's not about a moral position. It's not about saving the earth in this case, because some people actually don't care. But I mean, hate to say that, but I do think if we can get to what matters to them, which is a better quality of life, we will convince a few people, and that can be enough to get some of the change that we're talking about. Robert Studville: Somebody asked the question, "What role should environmental justice play in ensuring that vulnerable communities are not left behind in both recovery and future planning efforts?" Did you deal with this, Kate or Barry? Barry Long: Well, Paradise was filled with naturally occurring affordable housing. That's what it was. And, I mean, yes, the residents we were meeting with, many of them couldn't come back, but it was just cost-prohibitive at the end of the day. And there weren't the resources, even working with federal, state, and local government, and receiving a tremendous amount of money, it was just financially impossible. Kate Blystone: Yeah, we've got a little ways to go to see on this, but I can say in the long-term recovery plan process, we were meeting people where they were in addition to doing large-scale community engagement. We also did 190 one-on-one interviews, talking story with people, because it was really important. We had a high population of undocumented workers, undocumented folks that were impacted by this fire, a lot of Hawaiian communities. There's a lot of, it's a real melting pot here, like literally we have all sorts of communities represented. And we did things as far as language. We translated everything into multiple languages just so that we could reach as many people as we could. But there's always stuff that we can do more. If you go to our website and look at the long-term recovery plan, we also have a public engagement plan. And in that, we daylight the ways that we didn't meet the need, and that we want to meet the need going forward. So we said, you know, we didn't hit this group as well as we want, and we need to hit them again. And even with acknowledging those things, I'm sure there are things we missed. It's critical though, that all voices are raised in this process. Robert Studville: We have a question: "How can communities proactively prepare for total rebuild scenarios? What role can zoning reform and adopting urban street standards play in helping a community rebuild faster and streamline post-disaster recovery efforts?" Barry Long: Well, don't prepare before the disaster. If the disasters happen, it's too late. Because even with all the funds you're going to get for any of these disasters, you're never going to get what it costs to rebuild. There's always going to be a significant gap. And I, I, Mayor Jody Jones, she's since passed away, but unfortunately, way too young, but I met with her probably about a year and a half ago, and she had moved into a new home that was very similar to her old home, but it was hardened. And she said that she felt guilty for not feeling good about it. She said, "It's not, it is the house, and it's on my site, but my neighbors aren't here, and everything in it is brand new, even though it's the same stuff, it's not our stuff." And she said, "You don't realize what a fire survivor goes through when they, when they move back. Your community is still torn apart. It's not just about the structure." So if you can adapt in advance, it is the thing to do because you can never put your community back together the way it was. Robert Studville: Any... Okay, go ahead. Kate Blystone: Yeah, I would just like to add to that. I think we were very fortunate in that we had just finished the long-term plan, the long-range plan for Lahaina and for that entire region. And so knowing, I think the best thing that you can do is know what you want. Know what disaster is coming. You may not know what it is, but know what you want when it's over, and that pre-disaster planning is critical. But you can camouflage it in just doing good long-range planning for your community and having a vision for how you want your community to look in 20 years. And if something happens to you, like what happens to us, then you have a good foundation on which to build, rebuild your community. I also think you should look at your systems and say, "What is working and what isn't working?" And adjust those systems now so you don't have to adjust them in a panic later. Barry Long: I will say too, Kate, the regional, the regional emergency evacuation never worked as well as it should have. And one thing you can never replace is loss of life. And I would say, you know, from a preparedness standpoint, you do need to prepare for the disaster, but the coordination, the regional coordination is critical because what you can't live with is a traffic jam when it happens. Folks needlessly perishing, and that's what happens. Neil Payton: Having said all that, and there's no question that that planning is necessary ahead of time, but there is that old expression about "never let a crisis go to waste," variously attributed to different people. And in this case, in the case of the LA fires, there was a specific plan done for a specific plan Palisades in 2016. So it's only nine years ago. But it's a pretty, it doesn't do much plan. And I would say that the conversation that we're opening up here would not have been possible if this fire had not happened. You couldn't have had it. And so this is an example of there's a crisis, and let's not let this go to waste. This is not making light of the horribleness that befell people, but it is recognizing that this is our Katrina moment. Robert Studville: Okay, well, are there any ways that New Urbanists can engage for Pacific Palisades and Altadena, or this sort of thing? Neil, do you think? Neil Payton: Not in the Katrina sense, not in the sense we're going to come in and do this stuff, because there are already 10 different groups doing that. And I don't think we would have a platform like we did then because we did, the New Urbanists were literally invited in by the governor. I do think that as individuals and as groups, and in fact, some of the folks I've been meeting with are New Urbanists, or at least New Urban Adjacent. And it's really about being, really about being advocates, almost of getting in the room, getting as much as you can in the room with the people who decide. And that's a big issue, is who are the deciders? And being the advocate for all the things we've just talked about today. And being relentless about it, because I don't know that others will be. Kate Blystone: All right. If I can, sorry, just tack on a little bit to that. I think New Urbanists have really good solutions. And the community knows what their problems are. And being there, like Neil says, to advocate for these positions is good, but also listening to the problems that are coming up in the community and saying, "This is a New Urbanist solution to that," is having that voice in there, I think is going to be really critical, whether you're in LA or here in Lahaina or the next place this disaster happens. Robert Studville: Well, I'm going to close it out now, and I wanted to thank you all. It's been a wonderful discussion, really good discussion. And thanks for all the participants and the people who asked questions, and, uh, and of course, we're going to continue to talk about these things. And so, everybody have a great day. And once again, appreciate it. And we'll see you again on the Park Bench. Barry Long: Thank you, Rob, Kate, and Neil. Appreciate it. Kate Blystone: Thank you, Robert.